Wherein photos are presented, and the bottom of the barrel is breached.

The back office (what one might laughingly refer to as the "server room") now has an air conditioner! We've reconsidered our policy of keeping the computers absolutely as hot as we possibly can, and are trying another tactic for a while. We're managing to keep the temperature down around a balmy 80 degrees, and I'm telling you, it's like the fuckin' arctic in there now. There was supposedly ventilation in that room already, but it has never done a damned thing. We've even lost track of which way the air supposedly flows in the existing ducts. Anyway, we picked up a bulbous floor-mount AC and poked its tube out the erstwhile window, so it vents into the 3" gap between the buildings. It seems to be working ok, and it has only popped the circuit breaker once.

Smash Up Derby are pretty entertaining; they played mix-and-match covers, like the music from "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with the lyrics from "Billie Jean". The Phenomenauts are a space-themed rockabilly band, and they were a lot of fun too. One of the guys introduced a song by saying, "ladies and gentlemen, some other planets have been saying they're better than Earth, what do we think about that?" The audience booed, and they went into a song called "Earth is The Best!"

But The Epoxies are my new favorite band. (Yeah, I'm fickle.) Man, they were so great! They do a punk/new wave thing, sort of in the Devo vein. They were really energetic, totally spastic and theatrical, and put on one of the best shows I've seen in a long time. Go check out the videos on their web site, especially "Stop Looking At Me".

Laibach: I still don't get it. At all. Apparently there is some ironic appeal here that continues to go swoosh right over my head.

If you are the type to slow down and rubberneck at car crashes, then I can recommend this Saturday's event, the... "Pajama Jammy Jam". Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, we are no longer scraping the bottom of the barrel: we have gone straight through the barrel and are now gouging great big chunks out of the floor beneath. I think it's safe to say that this will top 2001's "Naughty Christmas" as the tackiest, most tasteless event ever to grace our hallowed hall. Strong words, I know, but consider: there's a lingerie contest. And it's sponsored by a party bus company.

Here's how awesome this is going to be: you know Remedy, our stultifyingly mainstream Friday night event? The Remedy guys complained that if we do events like the "Jammy Jam", we're going to give Remedy a bad reputation.

Welcome to the next level.

In more pleasant news, here are some events that you should totally come to in a completely non-sarcastic way:

13 Responses:

Earlier this year, my employer (a datacenter) went tits up. I was kept on for a few weeks after the layoffs, along with about 3 other people, to wind down operations. A couple days later, I walked into the server room (the ~20 servers that provided services for the company itself were in a dedicated room), and a wave of heat hit me. It was like a sauna. I immediately grabbed the portable CRAC unit, wheeled it into the server room and plugged it in. The initial temperature reading said 118F.

A couple minutes later I remembered those damn thermodynamics laws and grabbed some ducting to route the heat exhaust port on the unit outside the room.

An hour later, the heat levels were down to a reasonable level, so I began investigating WHY this happened. Turns out, when the datacenter was built, the person programming the Building Management System (which I believe was an offshoot of the HAL9000) put the server room in the same zone as the Network Operations Center, and of course the NOC had the thermostat in it. What happened was, the NOC zone was always set to 72F. The NOC was also staffed 24/7, so there were always (literally) warm bodies in the room, necessitating continuous cooling by the BMS. Hence, the server room was always beeing cooled. When that staff was canned and the NOC was vacant for a couple days, the BMS was sensing temperatures below 72F, and started pumping HEAT into the zone. So yeah, the damn system was heating my computer room.

You speak of VENTING hot air to the OUTSIDE from using an AIR CONDITIONER in a room currently at 80 degrees. It is currently 27 degrees (fahrenheit, you commie metric users) outside here. Something is not quite right...

Is the height of the barrel measured as an absolute amount, like kelvins, thus implying that there's a point at which one can get no lower, or is it an ever-extending relative scale, like decibels, thus implying that you could go on having even worse events every year for the rest of your life?

Aha, reminding me of my job with $company where I shared my top-of-building office1 with a half-dozen PCs, a prehistoric Mac, two Sun Netras and a Sun Enterprise 450. All with monitors, too. After the first heat-releated failure, the boss invested in2 a free-standing aircon unit which, like yours, had to have its exhaust tube popped out the nearest window. The added fun and games included that the window had to be closed when the office was empty (security, dontcha know), the tube occasionally slipped from the window and proceeded to simply move heat around the room instead of getting rid of it, and the unit contained what I presume was a dehumidifier collection bucket which would slowly fill with water extracted from the air, until it tripped the "I'M FULL NOW" switch and the unit would stop working until you emptied the bucket. Boy, do I never miss that job.

1. The building was one of those house-converted-to-office deals, without the conversion being any more than putting office furniture into the existing rooms. My room at the top collected all the heat rising from the rooms beneath, which in winter was considerable because everyone had the rads on full blast.

2. By "invested in" I mean "found, or stole, or something" because the unit was certainly not in anything resembling good condition.

Hmmmm....quick question....I'm curious :)Maybe I can get some business advice from you.Why do you mock your (paying?) customers? :)I'm assuming that the people running PJJ are going to pay you for the space?While I agree with your assessment of the PJJ aethetic (trashy, base, unimaginative, and a probable combined SAT score of 230 of all the participants...), I wonder why it would make business sense for the club owner and cheif executive to mock them in an open forum. There are other ways to discourage them from giving you money again, like just saying no when they ask :).It certainly provides good entertainment, so from my perspective, I thoroughly enjoy your bellicose assessment of them...but I defer again, to why that should trump the business aspect of it.Maybe this is the "never again" message to them that you want to send out :)We'll see what happens next year this time :)I may have to get my pajamas with the convenience wee-wee hole out.